1888-89.] 12 1 



and become proof against the attacks of the virulent type of the 

 disease. Dr. Gamaleia, of Odessa, in his researches on the 

 cholera vibrion, has found that the ordinary forms, as discovered 

 by Koch, are so little virulent that it is almost impossible to 

 communicate disease by inoculation with them. He has, there- 

 fore, in the first instance developed the virus by introducing 

 it into a pigeon after it has passed through a guinea pig. It 

 then kills pigeons by producing cholera, and after a few pas- 

 sages it acquires an increased virulence. This passage virus is 

 developed in a nutritive broth, which is heated to kill all the 

 microbes it contains. It is found that this sterilised broth pro- 

 duces death, with choleraic symptoms, but when the fatal dose 

 is divided, and the period of inoculation extended over from 

 three to five days, the animals experimented upon do not die 

 from the inoculation, but become proof against cholera. 



We may look forward with interest to the further investiga- 

 tion of this subject, in which Dr. Gamaleia has offered to repeat 

 his experiments before the French Academy of Science during 

 the present month, I believe. Pasteur's treatment of hydro- 

 phobia is accomplished on somewhat different lines. In it, the 

 spinal cords of rabbits which have died of the disease are dried 

 for a certain number of days, and diffused in a sterilised broth 

 which is hypodermically injected into the patient on successive 

 days, the number of days during which the cord has been dried 

 being decreased gradually for each injection. It is maintained 

 that by this treatment hydrophobia can be communicated to 

 healthy animals, or, by a modification of it as a preventative 

 measure, inoculation rendered the animals proof against the 

 disease, and that in the case of man, when inoculation is accom- 

 plished after infection, the mortality is materially reduced. 

 One of the developments of the study of micro-organisms has 

 been the adoption of the antiseptic treatment of wounds, to 

 which, when air gets access, it brings with it innumerable germs, 

 which produce putrefying action. Lister found that dilute car- 

 bolic acid killed the germs without injuriously affecting the 

 wound. Its use has now become general, and in a recent paper 



